Theatre

alexCoulombe

Tag: Chelsea Niven

B

One of the ways I measure the merit of a play is by how much discussion it generates afterward; my gut reaction after the show ended was B-, but because of how much mileage my wife and I got out of talking about it, I’ve bumped it up!

Hoo-rah!

Great acting on all fronts. Maretz as Wool pulled off the ‘highly-literate sports star’ swagger extremely well, and Gabriel Wright as his best friend Jason made a huge impression with his short time on stage.

I liked the simplicity of the ‘moment of crisis’ that set the play going– simple and compelling.

Liz liked the writing… so I’ll put that here.

Set design was thoroughly serviceable, which I far prefer over flashy, takes-forever-to-do-a-set-change stuff

Loved the radio broadcasts charting Henry Wool’s career that played during set changes. What a cool counterpoint to have the rise of his career play off the fall of it.

Blech…

Simple rule of playwriting that I am yet to feel exception for: NEVER make your second act longer than your first. The first act was well-paced and wrapped up a little under an hour. The second act, however, was nearly an hour and a half. This meant I organically felt the show was constantly about to end for the last three or four scenes.

The play did feel simply too long. Not that there are scenes I would have cut out or anything– I just think there was too much story to be told for one play. Divide it up into two plays, and make them companion pieces like reasons to be prettyand reasons to be happy! One of the plays could have focused on the reporter trying to get a story then ultimately deciding not to run it for fear of ruining Wool’s life. The second play could focus much more on Wool and all of his interpersonal conflicts between his dad and girlfriend and agent and ‘new rising star kid’, which basically felt like Friday Night Lights-lite.

The characters and their means of conflict resolution felt too similar across the board: sarcasm and yelling a lot. I initially blamed this on the writing, but Liz thinks it was a fault of the directing– a lot of the ‘loud’ moments could have been played much quieter with even greater impact.

Didn’t like the ending. To start, I think talking ghosts are rarely if ever well done, and it seemed to be a strange choice to have the play devote so much energy at the last minute to the father son relationship, which until that point felt like a B or C plot.